Saturday, December 31, 2016

THE "AT LEAST HE'S HONEST" FALLACY

Whenever someone says about a person, "at least he's honest", that's very handy, because then you know right away that they're talking about a terrible person. Terrible people love to use "honesty" as an excuse to say horrible, nasty things right to your face. They imply thereby that everyone else would say it, but they're all just pretending not to be terrible (they don't explain why, if everyone is so terrible, why we all pretend not to be). Abusers love to make you feel that everyone is really horrible, when actually it's just them.

This is the mirror of the whole "hypocrisy is worse than anything else, even genocide" thing I discussed in a previous post. It's all so adolescent. You catch your parents doing something less than great, and all of a sudden they are EVIL INCARNATE. It's time to grow up and differentiate between failing to live up to your ideals and outright evil actions. Let's try to do that in 2017, shall we?